Rachel Abbott: 'Self-publishing means the success of my books is entirely down to me'

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Five years ago, Rachel Abbott was retired. Today, she has been named the most popular self-published Kindle author in the UK by Amazon, thanks to the dark psychological thrillers she started writing to pass the time, and decided she “might as well” self-publish.

Marking five years since it opened its Kindle store in the UK, Amazon.co.uk this morning revealed its top-selling ebook writers. The chart is topped by the bestselling erotica author EL James, with the top 10 filled by mainstream names including Lee Child, George RR Martin and Gillian Flynn. But Abbott comes in 14th place – ahead of major writers such as Jeffrey Archer, Yann Martel and Karin Slaughter – after selling over a million ebooks to Kindle readers, according to Amazon.

“I’m slightly stunned,” she said today. “I launched my first book, Only the Innocent, in November 2011 – I’d taken early retirement, and was having a nice, easy, comfortable life, when I thought that I’d always wanted to write a book, so I sat down and did it.”

The story of a famous philanthropist’s murder, and DCI Tom Douglas’s investigation into the killing, Only the Innocent wasn’t an immediate hit. “I emailed everyone I knew and said ‘buy my book’, as you do, but after that, it went very quiet. It was selling one or two copies a day,” said Abbott, who before retirement ran her own interactive media company. “On Christmas day, though, it sold six, and I was delirious with joy. But then I thought, ‘this is quite pathetic, really – what on earth are you playing at? Why aren’t you doing proper marketing?’ So I sat down and wrote out a plan, and after Christmas I started to go through what I’d outlined.”

By February 2012, Only the Innocent was number one, holding the position for four weeks, and becoming the second highest-selling self-published title of the year. Abbott has since published three more novels, most recently Stranger Child, and says her total sales, including the paperbacks she has also published herself, top 1.5m.

“People ask me all the time how I did it, but the truth is that what worked in 2012 doesn’t work quite so well now,” she said. “Back then there were lots of forums where people chatted about books, but now they tend to be more people posting information and then moving on. At that time, I had nine followers on Twitter, so one of the first things I did was to build Twitter followers, from the followers of people I liked. You could do that then, because there was an auto followback function. So I followed all of the followers of Val McDermid, say, and managed to build up my followers that way ... I used social media pretty much exclusively to do my marketing, and each time I came out with a new book, things had changed. But it was all about trying to get the books noticed.”

With her books all currently priced at £3.48, and a royalty of 70%, she is “doing well financially”, she said, and at present has no plans to sign up with a mainstream publisher. “I have a very good agent, though, and we discuss constantly if I should go traditional or stick with self-publishing. But whatever it is I’m doing, it seems to be working, so while it continues to work, and so well, let’s keep doing it,” she said. “I have nothing against traditional publishing. I’m open to all kinds of ideas, but at the moment, this is working, so I don’t want to fix it.”

Tracy Bloom: I learned a huge amount from self-publishing

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The UK’s second most popular independently published author is Tracy Bloom, whose No-one Ever Has Sex on a Tuesday follows the fallout when childhood sweethearts have a one-night stand after a school reunion, with Nick Alexander, author of the Fifty Reasons series, third. In total, said Amazon, six self-published writers are in its top 100 Kindle authors of all time, based on UK sales.

Amazon also unveiled its top-selling Kindle books in the UK, with the list topped by James’ Fifty Shades of Grey. The remaining two titles in James’ erotic trilogy also make the top 10, as does Flynn’s thriller Gone Girl, Jonas Jonasson’s translated literary hit The Hundred-Year-Old Man Who Climbed Out of the Window and Disappeared, and Martel’s Life of Pi.

Five years of Kindle on Amazon.co.uk by numbers

Top-selling authors

1. EL James

2. Lee Child

3. Stieg Larsson

4. Suzanne Collins

5. George RR Martin

6. Gillian Flynn

7. Diane Chamberlain

8. James Patterson

9. Peter James

10. Sylvia Day

11. Daniela Sacerdoti

12. Jo Nesbo

13. Hilary Boyd

14. Rachel Abbott

15. Jonas Jonasson

16. Jojo Moyes

17. David Baldacci

18. Jeffrey Archer

19. Yann Martel

20. Karin Slaughter

Top-selling independent authors

1. Rachel Abbott (#14 overall)

2. Tracy Bloom (#47 overall)

3. Nick Alexander (#49 overall)

4. Nick Spalding (#52 overall)

5. Kerry Wilkinson (#53 overall)

6. Stephen Leather (#76 overall)

7. Katia Lief (#101 overall)

8. Paul Pilkington (#103 overall)

9. Mark Edwards (#105 overall)

10. JS Scott (#111 overall)

Top-selling Kindle books

1. Fifty Shades of Grey by EL James

2. Fifty Shades Darker by EL James

3. Gone Girl by Gillian Flynn

4. Fifty Shades Freed by EL James

5. The Hundred-Year-Old Man Who Climbed Out of the Window and Disappeared by Jonas Jonasson